Everett, and his arrogant simper, is making me uncomfortable—more uncomfortable than I already was. He doesn’t need to be looking at me the way he is. Freak. "Damn, girl. Where are you putting all of that? She eats like you, Ax," Everett says.
Axel shifts his focus to Everett and nods his head. "I'm not the one who forgets to wipe food off my face," he argues, but without any inflection in his voice.
I grab my napkin and drag it across my mouth before peering over at Everett for his reaction to Axel's low blow. Everett doesn't seem to care as he casually grabs his napkin and cleans up the splattered sauce from his chin. "Touché," Everett says against his napkin. "Well played, my friend."
The joke between the two of them eases my nerves a bit, but only because it shows a small glimpse of their human side.
"There's a case file you need to pick up downtown by eight tomorrow," Axel tells Everett. "There's also a body on Harvard Avenue you need to tend to, as well."
"No way," I tell them. "I’m willing to bet this job doesn’t even really come with room and board, does it?" I know this is coming to end because I’m making it come to an end, so I take the last bite of my steak.
"Yeah, we have a room for you," Axel says before leaning to the side and retrieving his phone from an inner pocket of his suit.
Just tonight. I need a place to sleep. Then, I’ll leave. "I’m not hurting anyone else or watching anyone hurt themselves."
"Twenty-eight is awake," Axel says, ignoring me.
"I figured he'd be out for another hour or so," Everett mumbles with a mouthful of food.
"That's not the problem," Axel says. "I'm going to go handle it. Philips is waiting on us for this one."
Axel stands from the table and neatly pushes his chair in. "What do you want me to do with her?" Everett asks, nodding toward me.
"She's coming with me," Axel says.
Everett seems confused by this, which should probably concern me. "She is?" he questions.
I have a not-so-subtle hunch that Axel doesn't like to be questioned by anyone.
"I need to see if the last test was a coincidence or if she is truly capable of handling the dirty shit that goes down. Twenty-eight is the perfect case to find out."
No. Not happening. No way. I’m lost between their back and forth banter, but I’m not doing this.
"I disagree," Everett argues with a distressed hitch in his voice.
"I'm not worried," Axel tells him.
"I'll see you the morning, Everett," Axel says, taking steps away from the table. "Let's go."
Everett stands from the table, and I follow, feeling an unfamiliar heaviness in my stomach from eating a full meal. Despite feeling like I may get sick, I also feel a surge of energy, which I haven’t felt in over a year. Putting aside everything that’s happened over the last few hours, I’m grateful for at least this one meal they gave me.
I speed up to meet Axel’s quick pace, walking closely behind his heels as we cross through the lobby of the hotel and back around the corner to the fire-escape door. Axel takes a key from his pocket and looks around, checking for watchful eyes, I assume. We take the same path down the stairs as we did earlier, through the warehouse, and back to the hall of utility doors. "I just need to know where I’m sleeping tonight."
"After we’re through, I’ll show you," he says.
"I can’t watch any more of what I already saw today. I will not be a part of it."
Axel groans with annoyance and throws his head back. "God, quit it. These aren’t good people. Okay? We’re not murderers, despite what you think."
"I don’t know what to think," I mumble.
"You don’t have to think about anything."
"Tell me you’re not going to hurt someone right now," I tell him.
"Me— Axel," he points to himself. "I"m not going to hurt anyone. Neither are you."
"My name is Harley, in case you ever want to know who the hell you’re working with," I tell him.
"Is it now?" he says, insinuating some sort of disbelief. "You mean like the motorcycle?"
"Funny," I quip. "Never heard that one before."
"Hi, Harley," he says, exerting fake excitement. "Feel better now?"
"Sure. Yeah, now that I've spoken my name out loud, I feel so much better." The obnoxious connotation in my response is purposeful, yet seems to have no effect on this man.
Axel stops short, forcing me to walk into his steel-like back, then gives me a second to regain my footing before sighing with aggravation. "You know, for someone so desperate, you have quite an attitude. Have you already forgotten that I just fed you?"
"Are you forgetting I forced someone to slice her wrist for you?" I respond with haste.
"I never asked you to do that," he replies. His unchanging tone and demeanor are irking me. He has zero personality—like most serial killers, I’m sure.
"You told me only one of us was coming out alive," I remind him.
"It didn't have to be you," he corrects me as he continues down the hall.
I try to stop the words catching in my throat as they threaten to pour out in the form of obscenities, but I’m still unsure about him, other than he’s a huge douchebag.
As if he heard my silent words, he glances over his shoulder at me and winks. Seriously? "I know what you're thinking," he says.
"Oh, did you hear me call you a douchebag in my head?" I’m basically asking for him to end me right here, right now—I’m losing the battle in my head.
"I did," he says, stopping in front of a door numbered twenty-eight. Axel takes his suit coat off, hangs it on the doorknob across the hall, and rolls his sleeves up.
"Are you locking me in another room or not?" I ask with a heavy exhale.
"No."
He opens the door to the dark room, allowing in a small beam of light from the hall. I try to peek inside, but nothing is illuminated inside.
"Ready?" Axel asks as he flips on the light.
I’m not surprised to spot a man tied to a chair in the back corner of the room, but the look of shock on the man’s face makes me wonder.
8
Axel
We walk into the room and I pull out two chairs, placing them down in the center to face Norm; another murderer with a spongy brain who is just waiting to be wrung out. With his arms and legs tied to the chair, he’s detained enough to start the process.
There are days I feel like I've been conducting business like this for most of my life even, though it has only been a year and a half since Agent Roberts sought me out, offering this grand opportunity as a barter to clear my name. While grateful to have my freedom, I often wish there wasn't a stipulation to maintain what I should never have lost.
It took a while to get to the point where I’m able to conduct actions without a twitch in my heart or an ache in my stomach. I believe I'm now officially soulless and numb.
"¿Dónde estoy?" Norm groans, sounding distressed and confused, just how I want him. "What da fuck is dis? You prison guards were supposed to kill me. You idiotas fuck dis up too?" More groans bellow from his throat as he tries to shift his body around. "Fuck you, mannn." Norm's words come out in long forms of slurs like he's wasted, but I'm thinking it's more likely from the concussion Everett gave him a couple of hours ago.
I glance over my shoulder to check on Harley. She’s pacing, holding her hands up to the sides of her face—clearly upset or angry—both probably. I think she can handle herself when necessary but this might be overkill for tonight.
I turn back toward Norm and laugh. "Norm, mi amigo, tendrias suerte si fuera guardia de prisión." In his native language he was speaking when we picked him up, I tell him he'd be lucky if I were a prison guard.
I walk toward him and kick his chair backward, watching as his head crashes against the cement. The impact isn’t enough to knock him out so I lift my leg and plant my heel into his face, hearing a crack echo through his jaw. The short growl he manages to emit stops before I can lift my foot. He’s out co
ld, but I’m sure the crack sounded worse than it was.
I finally see a reaction poking through the blank canvas Harley’s face has portrayed for the last few hours. Her eyes are wide, and she swallows hard while observing the blood from Norm's left ear pool into a perfect circle beneath his cheek.
"You told me you weren’t hurting anyone," she grunts. "Is this just for recreational purposes or is there a reason for your madness? Oh, and your Spanish accent could use some help—it’s barely intelligible." Wow. This chick has no bounds. I fucking learned Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic in less than eighteen months and she's going to correct my pronunciation?
"I wouldn't refer to our job as recreational fun, but thank you for the linguistics tip. I will certainly take that into consideration the next time I'm torturing someone who speaks Spanish."
Harley's lip curls into a snarl as she crosses her arms over her chest. "Just tell me where I’m sleeping," she says.
Regardless of the lack of reasons I have to smile, I can't help the one fighting against my mouth, knowing I'm getting under her skin, which shouldn't be part of my goal here. However, until I figure out who the hell she is for sure, this is how things are going to be. "I'm sorry. Are you upset that you didn't feel like you were being wooed by a hot date while dining in an upscale Mexican restaurant somewhere?"
The normal pale complexion of her face warms into a soft pink, and it feels almost like a game now that I think I know how to bring her attitude down a notch.
"Yeah, Axel, a hot date who just stuffed his foot down some guy’s throat, causing blood to spew like spray paint all over the white walls," she retorts.
That didn’t last long. Whatever.
While admiring my handiwork, I lean over and pull Norm back up, righting the chair he's still tied to. "You'll learn everything you need to know as time passes," I tell her. "Right now, just think of it as your first day of training ... with many more to come." Or however many it takes for me to find out if you’re Isabelle Hammel.
She pushes away from the wall she was leaning on and takes a couple of steps toward me with rage radiating through her blue eyes.
I nod my head to the hall, silently commanding her to leave the room. We head out into the hall, closing Norm in the room alone. Harley repositions herself against the hallway wall and sighs. "Look, I already told you ... I'm not in this to beat, kill, and do the rest of your dirty work, all while wondering if I'm really going to make it out of whatever this is, alive," she says. "I’m a good person."
Is she, though?
I want to laugh, but resist the urge and make my way over to one of the storage closets a few feet down the hall. I reach in and grab a clean towel to clean the excess blood off my hands since I can’t get a thorough soap bleach wash in just yet. I glance down at my white shirt, hoping the blood splatter went in the other direction. Maybe I shouldn’t be proud of how good I’ve gotten at preventing those stains. I suppose it's just another skill I've obtained with this job—one not too many people can brag about. Yup, clean … not a speck of blood on me. The wall in that room, however, is almost like a masterpiece of art. "Here’s the deal," I say, keeping my voice soft and calm, "I'm sure it looks like we're a couple of brutes walking around, committing atrocities no one knows of, but there's a much bigger picture here."
Harley sweeps her hair off her shoulder and pinches her lips together. "Hmm. Seems like a nice cover story to me," she says. The sarcasm isn’t going unnoticed, as I’m sure she’s intending. "Your plan is to smooth me over so I'll turn a blind eye to what you're doing, right?" I release a long sigh, needing to release the stress building in my chest. It’s hard to believe how thrown off she is to my plan—so hard, I’m having doubts.
"That’s not my plan," I tell her.
She presses her lips together tightly, causing them to turn white in the center. She’s obviously irate, but whatever. "It doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out you're going to pay and feed me for a bit, then dispose of me the same way you do all the others?"
She obviously thinks so little of me.
I take a couple steps toward her, tilting my head slightly to the side. "You know, considering you have the balls to knock on a sketchy-looking door for a job and then exploit a mentally ill woman under what I would call an impossible circumstance, and then willingly sit down with us to have dinner, I’d say you're not as innocent and righteous as you're acting," I tell her, hoping to get a reaction from my accusation.
Instead, she chuckles and shakes her head dismissively. "Axel, you don’t know anything about me."
9
Harley
I did knock on that door for a job. Starvation is like the feeling of addiction and most people would do a lot worse to settle the nagging pain in their hollow stomach. It’s clear Axel has never been in such despair that he could possibly understand what lengths someone will go through to eat and acquire shelter. While living this way for the last couple years, after growing up moderately well off, I can't say I've ever known anyone who would willingly walk into a situation like I'm in, but I can't blame all of this on desperation either. I got myself into this situation, and now I'm paying the consequences for it. Even the smart girls who seem to have it all, can make mistakes.
Axel opens another closet in our vicinity and reaches in for something. "How much longer until you’re done assaulting people for the day?" I ask as he retrieves a navy blue jacket. He pulls it over his shoulders and zips it up halfway.
"Soon enough," he responds, simply.
"Is that your I'm-trying-to-look-normal jacket for when you go home to your wife and kids?" I ask.
He offers me a passing smirk, then turns back toward the room Norm is confined in. With a swift movement of unlocking the door, Axel steps back inside while showcasing three big yellow letters spelling out "ATF" on the back of his jacket. "I don't have a family, Harley, but thanks for the ass-umption."
A pit in my stomach engorges, causing me an unsettling discomfort. I certainly don’t care about his marital status anymore. Now, I’m more concerned with the likelihood of this being a step up. Did the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms lure me here to see if I'd persuade a woman to kill herself? Or, worse, watch to see if I’d follow two brutal men who are committing every type of felony I can think of?
Before I can even start blurting out some sort of backpedal to an ATF agent, Norm begins to move and squirm in the chair he's still tied to. Axel is quick to hover back over him, and I close my eyes in preparation for another pounding I don't want to see. Wait … if Axel is really an ATF agent, would he be beating the pulp out of someone tied to a chair?
"Mr. Santiago, you're lucky we got to you in time," Axel asserts in a way that demands the respect of this man. He's also speaking English instead of Spanish now. What the hell?
"¿Qué? What da fuck you talkin' about, hombre? Where da hell am I?" With a slur to his words and a groggy haze in his eyes, Norm fights against all his restraints as if he’s becoming reacquainted with the fact that he’s detained.
"My name is Agent Rawel. Twelve hours ago, your own cartel captured you from death row," he says. "They brought you to a warehouse that looked very much like this and convinced you that you have some information they need—information they need before your execution."
"Fuck you, man," Norm seethes.
"Funny," Axel says. "That's the same thing you had just said to them as we breached the room and saw one of them knock you out."
Norm struggles against the chair again, obviously feeling the pain in his wrists and ankles from the tight restraints. "De knocked me out?" Norm asks through struggling laughter.
Axel paces around to the back of Norm's chair and glances at me, squinting with a questioning look. Am I'm supposed to understand any of what he's doing or what's going on? With no response from me other than the confusion likely written across my face, Axel's foot comes up and catches the guy right in the back of his head, forcing him into another unconscious state. It seemed easi
er this time, especially since Axel didn't hit him nearly as hard.
Axel doesn’t say anything to me as he leaves the room once again. I follow, watching him head right back to the closet where he removes the ATF coat, then fixes the pleats in his folded sleeves.
He's brainwashing this guy.
"Back to the Spanish accent now?" I ask, breaking my five minutes of silence.
"Too predictable?" he asks, with that same sinful half-smirk he's offered a couple of times in the past hour.
"Is it safe to assume you're not with the ATF?" I lament with an unamused raised brow.
Axel grins as he leans back against the wall. "Such a smarty-pants," he says, in a stupid-sounding, sardonic tone, speaking to me as if I were a child.
"You know, there are more efficient ways of brainwashing him, right?" I say, mimicking his pole-in the ass sophistication. Axel glances at me with a blank stare, like he's desperately trying to hide the fact that he's constructing his next comment. "Plus, I suspect that one more blow to this guy's head—after you're done sweet talking him like a Spaniard—he'll have some permanent damage and you'll lose your subject." I might be offering too much assistance here, but I get a kick out of this crap.
"What type of degree did you say you had?" Axel asks, his interest obviously piqued.
"Medical," I lie. He's not getting any more information out of me until I find out what the hell this business is.
10
Axel
"How long do you plan to wait out here this time?" she asks as if she knows what I’m doing. Maybe she does.
"Just a few minutes." We wait out the short amount of time with an accompanying silence and thought probing stares before I lead us back into the confined room, finding Norm still passed out. I’m not surprised he hasn’t come to after the last blow to his head, but I was hoping he’d be up by now. It’s getting late. "I guess he’s not ready for us yet."
Darkest Perception_A Dark and Mind-Blowing Steamy Romance Page 5